January 16, 2009

Our long national nightmare is (almost) over

This country, and the world, is almost rid of a President who never should have been placed in office to begin with.

At the time, millions hoped that at least he wouldn't do too much damage before he left office. Well, that hope has long since been dashed.

Perhaps the political reporter from BET said it best when describing George W. Bush's attitude during his recent pathetic attempt to sell his legacy as anything but a miserable failure.

She said his message is, "I may not always be right, but I'm never wrong."

And that's it. The shallow frat boy, the guy who never really appeared to even want to be president, then once there, ran the country as if he were still the goofy governor of Texas who has no real responsibility for governing. (In Texas, the Lt. Governor does all that hard stuff, the Gov. is largely a figure-head.)

Hundreds of books have already been written on the various colossal blunders, stunningly stupid, arrogant, ignorant, and venal attitudes and actions of Bush and his incompetent administration. "How hard can it be?" seemed to be his guiding principle. "So what?", his inspiring creed.

The era will be known as the rise of the ignorant, the revenge of the C student, and the worst presidency of modern times.

I've neither the stomach nor the capacity to even begin to scratch the surface of all the things that have occurred during this destructive era, much of which the general public is completely ignorant of.

There's dozens of books which have already been written documenting the most egregious, and doubtlessly, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, more written about just how bad it really was, now that the Don of the Bush Mafia has been exiled. Maybe some will finally emerge to reveal the truth without as much fear of being rubbed out either figuratively or literally.

There will be much to celebrate on January 20th.

But it's really hard to determine if the cause of the joy will be due to finally getting this gang of know-nothing right wing assholes away from where they can do anymore damage, or the fact that common sense and informed and rational thought is making a return to the White House, and may rub off on Capitol Hill.

Myself, I will be celebrating the end of this dark chapter in American history. The mere fact of not having to look at Bush's genetically damaged mug, or listen to his brain damaged attempts at the English language, not having to watch his ridiculous swagger, his infuriating sneer, and the endless stream of bullshit that emerges every time he moves his lips.

Bush thought being president wouldn't be that tough. Karl and Dick would take care of the hard part. He could just hang out in Crawford, and just pop up every once in a while to try to sell their bullshit to the public. The whole thing was run as though it was nothing but an ad campaign. We the people were just a bunch of patsies that they could placate with phony appeals to mindless patriotism and macho bluster, and constant and never-ending appeals to fear, endless threats, nameless and largely imagined, and the assurance that no one but Bush could magically keep us safe.

Well, how could you doubt that? They did a hell of a job protecting us from 9-11. But of course, in Bush world, his administration didn't start until September 12, rather than 9 months earlier.

And despite repeated warnings, including a memo entitled, "Bin Laden determined to strike within U.S.", anti-terror budgets were eliminated, Ashcroft told an aid he didn't want to hear about al Queda anymore, and Condoliza Rice, the most incompetent and failed National Security Director and Secretary of State in generations, actually said before a congressional committee that, "...nobody could have imagined that terrorists would use airplanes as weapons.", despite the fact that intelligence had been warning of just that for years.

"How could we have possibly been prepared for that?", Rice asked, in one of the worst examples of outright lying and bullshit put out by this gang. And it got worse. Trying to avoid any responsibility or even accountability, a pursuit which seemed to occupy most of the time of the entire administration, who bizarrely seemed congenitally incapable of ever admitting even the slightest error, Rice actually tried to argue, and Bush flying monkeys parroted the idea, that well, yeah, we did know al Queda was planning to attack us, and maybe with hijacked planes, but we didn't know the EXACT DAY AND TIME they were planning to do it, so, obviously, you can't blame us for having such a shitty response and doing zero to prevent it.

And perhaps it's worth remembering that during those days, which they now constantly insist were so earth-shattering that anyone would have made mistakes, one decision Bush managed to make mere hours after the attack was to allow the private jets of Saudi oil billionaires to be the ONLY aircraft allowed in the air post attack to fly around the country picking up their kids and relatives and flying them back to the country where 15 of the 19 terrorists lived.

Bush is left scraping the barrel for anything he's accomplished, and left trying the flimsy claim that it was he who has kept us safe from attack since 9-11.

The foiled plots they point to are all extremely minor, and none of them amounted to anything but a few crack-pots who were plotting attacks they couldn't possibly pull off anyway. None of these cases were in any way related to al Queda at all.

In Bush's mind, and wingnuts still in denial, the fact that al Queda has kept quiet is attributable to Bush's actions.

And in the rooster's mind, his crowing causes the sun to rise.

Both claims are equally dubious.

And it just goes on and on and on, from shredding the constitution and breaking the law by spying on U.S. citizens without any oversight, committing clear war crimes by directly authorizing torture, devastating environmental protections and giving away millions of acres of federal land to mining and logging corporations, allowing media consolidation which has wrecked both the quality and Independence of the news we receive, turning our nation from a subject of near universal sympathy and solidarity in the wake of 9-11 to a weakened power with little credibility or moral authority at all, and the list goes on and on an on and on and on.

If anything, the only saving grace of this mind-boggling dereliction of duty and shirking of responsibility in favor of sheer greed and abuse of power may be that it clearly illustrated exactly what a leader should NOT do. George, Dick, Don, Condi, and the rest, thanks for being a shining beacon to the world of just how bad it can be when we're conned into thinking that smart people are dumb, science is baloney, the President would never lie us into a war costing thousands of U.S. lives and hundred of thousands of innocent lives just for some goofy notion that it would be easy and self-aggrandizement. A person who clearly views the in comic book terms, as if it's all nothing but a game of Risk with no consequences, isn't the person you want leading this country or any other.

Maybe the final tragedy of the Bush era will be that George W. Bush will be proven right. He came in as a spoiled brat kid who had never fully matured, who's entire life consisted of opportunities handed to him, his blowing it, and family friends coming in to bail him out. And the more he failed, the higher up he rose until we ended up with this.

His response to the fact that his decisions were nearly universally thought to be bad and often tragic mistakes were met with, "So?" That sums up his attitude.

He made decisions from the "gut", as he pointed out, and never sweated the consequences. Self examination or introspection was for wussies and egg-heads, not for George W. Bush. "Who cares? No skin off my nose." was his guiding principle.

And now as he walks away back into the life of a billionaire prince, he'll be proven right.

There ARE no consequences. Not for George W. Bush.

He'll never lose a second of sleep over the hundreds of thousands of innocents he's caused to be slaughtered, or the needless deaths of thousands of U.S. servicemen and women and the grief their deaths leave behind, all killed while he dithered and played for time to run out the clock in Iraq for his political benefit.

No, his conscience won't bother Bush in the slightest, because he's practiced at it. As he's boasted several times, he doesn't look back, doesn't worry, and never thinks twice about what he's done. In other words, he has no conscience. So no consequences there.

He'll live like a billionaire with everything he could ever want or need given to him, including everyone around him treating him with the highest respect and deference. The many billionaires whose wealth Bush has helped double or triple will shower him with perks and luxuries. No consequence there.

There will never be any investigation, or at least none that will be allowed to get too close to holding him accountable for his actions. No consequence there.

Ah, but history. Surely history will not be kind to George W. Bush. That's got to hurt him, right?

Nope. Not in the slightest. He's stated on more than one occasion that he couldn't care less about what historians say about him. First of all, he thinks everyone's got him all wrong, that he really was a great president.

Secondly, historians are them pointy headed intellectuals (aka intelligent people), and he has nothing but contempt for people like that anyway.

And besides, Bush showed us his attitude about being judged by history when asked by Bob Woodward how it would judge the Iraq invasion, when he responded, "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead." Translation? "I don't give a shit."

Ain't he clever? heh heh Just the kind of juvenile thought process we need in the White House. And it's not like he didn't give us thousands of clues going back to prior to 2000. The American people were sold a bill of goods and the Supreme Court did the rest. And then they were manipulated and stampeded by fear (and a Dem candidate who was lackluster at best) into making the same mistake again in 2004, a mistake of judgement on a cosmic scale that will confound historians for ages.

And as a consequence of George W. Bush, the very wealthiest were allowed to run rampant, literally looting the country, with the help of Bush and Republicans allowing them to rig the game every chance they got and however they wanted, bleeding the middle class white, and using the "War on Terror" as if it were the world's largest ATM, we now stand poised on the brink of decades of economic decline and hardship for millions of hard working Americans.

They weren't content simply with doubling the national debt and hanging the bill for their rampage on our children and their children. No, they kept going until the entire country will have to pay the cost of their wholesale looting in the near term and beyond.

Bush and the Republicans got their way. They did things the way they wanted, and they managed to bring the world's strongest economy to it's knees a mere 8 years after being handed an enormous surplus, the first in decades.

So so long George W. Bush. So long stupid cackle, so long government of, by, and for, the highest bidder. So long having a president run this country as if it were his own damn baseball franchise or something, that he could do with whatever the hell struck him at the moment.

So long to having an arrogant, incurious, spoiled man-child run the country and cause untold death, misery, and anti-American hatred which will last generations.

So long George, you shallow, arrogant, asshole. Like your entire life, others are left to clean up the messes you leave in your wake. We and the next few generations of Americans, Americans who've managed to survive your reign of error, will try to undo the lasting damage you've done.

3 Comments:

I'm betting that Bush's freedom to travel to other countries will be at least slightly curtailed (as it is for Rumsfeld and will be for Cheney), because there will always be people in other countries who won't hesitate to try to arrest them for war crimes.

That's not very much comfort, but it might cause the idea that much of the world sees them as war criminals seep into their brains.

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